[PD] midifile interface to qlist

[Krzysztof Czaja]

hi,

a prototype midifile interface to qlist is almost ready now.
Still, before releasing, I would like to do some of my own
pre-alpha testing first, but this will need to wait until my
teaching duties ease a little.

There is a preliminary version snapshot available as three
files (s_mf.h, s_mf.c, and x_qlist.c.diff) you can preview at
suita.chopin.edu.pl/~czaja/midifile/.  Have a quick look, if you
like, but please remember this is a pre-release, ie. it is not
meant to be used yet.  I wait for any comments that would help
me avoid silly mistakes.

The implementation was done from scratch, following Standard
MIDI Files 1.0 Draft specification, to make shure it closely
obeys the basic standard, conforms to the `PureData coding style',
and easily and naturally integrates with Pd code.  Anyway, the
basic parsing is pretty simple, the hard parts are specific to
Pd and/or not covered in libraries I know of (but I know much
too little).  Besides, I prefer to deal with my own bugs, rather
than to propagate other's.

In this prototype version I wanted to keep changes to x_qlist.c
as minimal and localized, as possible.  Therefore, instead of
adding `mf' file format to qlist's `read' and `write' messages
(and providing automatic format detection in case a user had not
specified read format), I have choosen a quick and dirty way of
adding separate `mfread' and `mfwrite' messages.  I think the
interface should be integrated with plain read/write in the final
version.

There is much more to say, mainly about general feasibility of
using qlist as a sequencing tool (but I prefer not to go into
that, yet...)

Krzysztof